This is the class blog for Eng 1102 at GA Tech called "Fiction, Human Rights, and Social Responsibility." The purpose of this blog is to extend our discussion beyond the classroom and to become aware of human rights issues that exist in the world today and how technology has played a role in either solving or aggravating them. Blogs will be a paragraph long (250 words) and students will contribute once every three weeks according to class number. Entries must be posted by Friday midnight.

Thursday, September 19, 2013

The Internet and Human Rights

Nations across the world don't
have the freedoms that we receive in the United States. Every day
people are denied their basic human rights including their freedom of
speech and freedom to information. Why is this? It's because
knowledge is power and a nation that can control the flow of
information also controls it's people. In 2002 Jonathan Zittrain and
Benjamen Edelman conducted empirical tests to determine what websites
were being blocked in China. They determined that China was blocking
websites related to news, education, health, religion, and democracy.
This is a clear violation of human rights, yet virtually no action
has been taken.

In a more recent paper, Xiaowei Wang argues that we
should begin considering the internet as a human right because access
to the internet aids in the protection of one's rights to free speech
and information, and removal of the internet would jeopardize those
rights. Wang addresses a counter argument made by Viton Cerf which
states that: even though the internet does enable human rights, it is
not a human right. Wang states that this argument assumes that human
rights should be minimalistic and transhistorical. This misses the
point of human rights; this logic wouldn't include many of the human
rights in the UDHR such as rights to democracy, freedom of speech, or
paid vacation. Wang states that in order for human rights to be
powerful they must be able to react to the current political and
technological climate. Their political purpose is to protect the
people who cannot help themselves.

That being said, I disagree with
Wang's argument that the internet is a human right, but instead
uphold that it is an enabler of human rights. Therefore China and
other countries are clearly violating their peoples' human rights by
filtering their internet and outside information. Instead of making
the internet a human right, we should seek stronger corrective
measures which would ensure that current human rights are not
violated. However, this is much easier said than done. When
Secretary of State Hilary Clinton criticized China for their internet
policies in 2010, China responded harshly saying that her speech
greatly hurt the US-China relationship. Because of this it is
unlikely that the US will preform any real intervention. There is no
easy solution to this problem and the Chinese people will suffer
until we find one.

1 comment:

Yes, I think this is the single greatest question that we have to ask about our digital age and our dependence on the web for vital communications. Is it a right? Or enabler of rights? I kind of think about the web like the phone - we use it just liked we used to use the phone - to communicate, to reach out, to get information. If we think about phones being wiretapped, it's pretty horrible. Or we could go even further back to letter-writing. What if all letters were opened before they got to the recipient of it? If we think about this in regards to the internet, we see the violation. In the cases of phones, letters, etc. - they were only tapped or censored if criminal activity was suspected. So...is everyone now considered a potential criminal?